5 ms·
I asked AI to complete an AGPL code file I wrote a decade ago. It did a pretty good job. What came out wasn't 100% identical, but clearly a paraphrased copy of
by blagie 2y ago
I asked AI to complete an AGPL code file I wrote a decade ago. It did a pretty good job. What came out wasn't 100% identical, but clearly a paraphrased copy of my original.
Even if we accept the house-of-cards of shaky arguments this essay is built on, even just for the sake of argument, where Open AI breaks my copyright is by having a computer "memorize" my work. That's a form of copy.
If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation. If I can paraphrase it, ditto. If I encode it in a different format (e.g. bits on magnetic media, or weights in a model), it still includes a duplicate.
On the face of it, OpenAI, Hugging Face, Anthropic, Google, and all other companies are breaking copyright law as written.
Usually, when reality and law diverge, law eventually shifts; not reality. Personally, I'm not a big fan of copyright law as written. We should have a discussion of what it should look like. That's a big discussion. I'll make a few claims:
- We no longer need to encourage technological progress; it's moving fast enough. If anything, slowing it down makes sense.
- "Fair use" is increasingly vague in an era where I can use AI to take your picture, tweak it, and reproduce an altered version in seconds
- Transparency is increasingly important as technology defines the world around us. If the TikTok algorithm controls elections, and Google analyzes my data, it's important I know what those are.
That's the bigger discussion to have.
- naming_the_user 2y agoCleanroom implementation comes to mind. If I just remember the source code of a 100 line program and then reproduce it verbatim a week later that doesn’t suddenly make it a new work.
- franktankbank 2y agoThis is why I don't believe in restrictive licensing of open work.
- HPsquared 2y agoMaybe the infringement occurs when a user uses the model to produce the facsimile output.
- throwaway173738 2y agoGood idea. Let’s make it a minefield of copyright infringement for the user so they never know whether it’s emitting something novel or it’s emitting AGPL code.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoWhy the heavy handed internet sarcasm? Youtube has handled this exact issue with fingerprints for a while.
- formerly_proven 2y agoThat's what the legal department at my employer (huge multinational corp) came up with: When an employee uses one of the approved gen-ai models it's on the employee to check the output isn't infringing - legal argues that not doing so would be grossly negligent, making the employee personally liable.
- throwaway173738 2y agoIf my company had a policy like that I would just not use AI tools at all for anything.
- mtndew4brkfst 2y agoBest possible outcome. Unlikely to be, but maybe even the intended outcome from legal's POV.
- SilasX 2y agoI agree that you should call the output copyright infringement (or not) without regard to how you got there. So, if it produces an identical copy of the text, or of e.g. Indiana Jones, that you then distribute it, sure, that is copyright infringement. But the mere act of using them for training and producing new works shouldn't be! In fact, until 2022, pretty much no one regarded it as a copyright violation to "learn from copyrighted works to create new ones" -- just the opposite! That's how it's supposed to work! Only when hated corporations did it with bots, did the internet hive mind suddenly decide that's stealing, and take this expansive view of IP rights (while, of course, having historically screamed bloody murder about any attempts to fight piracy).
- protimewaster 2y ago> If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation. If I can paraphrase it, ditto. Yeah, that's something that I've not seen a good answer to from the "everything AI does is legal" people. Even if the training is completely legal, how do you verify that the generated output is not illegally similar to a copyrighted work that was ingested? Humans get in legal trouble if they produce a work that's too similar. Does AI not? If AI doesn't, can I just write an AI whose job is to reproduce copyrighted content and now I have a loophole to reproduce copyrighted content?
- morkalork 2y agoIf gen-AI had been used to produce Nosferatu there still would have been a case, right?
- the_snooze 2y agoSeems like so much tech "innovation" these days is really just to sneak around laws and social norms in pursuit of a rent-seeking position.
- mdp2021 2y ago> Humans get in legal trouble if they [???] a work that's too similar If they sell a work that's too similar. What intellectuals do is quoting. Of course legal.
- bko 2y agoI think you have to be practical. It would be difficult to train an AI to consume Harry Potter and compress it but prevent it from recreating it. You can try and people do, but there are always ways around it. But it's on an individual prompt basis. It's not like ChatGPT can produce the entirety of its text and sell it as a pdf. It's just a device that could reproduce it much like a word processor is a device that you can read the book and type out the contents. So the question is one of practicality. Do we ensure that no copyrighted material is in the training data? Difficult but probably not impossible. But what you can't do is target the content in all its various other forms, from descriptions of the plot, reviews, fan fiction, etc. So in the end its pretty much a lost cause. So what to do about it? I don't know. In the utilitarian sense, I think the world in which this technology exists in a non-crippled form is a better richer world than one in which there are all these procedural steps to try to prevent this (and ultimately failing). Whats the harm here? Are people not buying Harry Potter books and just having an LLM painfully recreate the plot? I would imagine Harry Potter fans would be able to explore their love of the media through LLMs and that would drive more revenue to Harry Potter media, much like fan fiction and pirated music lead to more engagement and concert sales. In the case of new art, maybe fewer artists get commissioned, but let's be real, Mike Tyson wasn't going to contract out an artist to create a ghibli style animation of him anyway, so there's really little harm in LLMs here to artists. If anything it expands the market and interest.
- wiseowise 2y ago> If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation. By your logic anyone with good enough memory violates copyright law just by act of remembering something.
- great_wubwub 2y agoNo - it's the reproduction, not the memorization.
- greyface- 2y agoIt's reproduced in the memorizer's neural connectome.
- wiseowise 2y agoSo training AI on copyrighted data isn’t a problem unless it spits out the data verbatim. Correct?
- lelanthran 2y agoClose. It isn't a problem until it spits out a similar enough copy. Copyright violation doesn't have to be verbatim; taking a 4k movie and reencoding it to 320x200 before distribution isn't legal.
- Apreche 2y agoNo, because you don’t actually violate copyright law until you produce and distribute copies. It’s perfectly legal to memorize a book, type up a copy from memory, and to even print out a copy that you keep for yourself. But as soon as you start trying to sell or distribute copies, even for free, now you’re breaking the law as written.
- shakna 2y agoMemory? No. Reproduction? Yes. If you write down a sizeable quote, that can be a copyright violation.
- 2y ago
- dietr1ch 2y agoWhat's stopping me from paraphrasing movies by peppering the least significant color bits? Would that make copying them legal?
- tempodox 2y agoEven if we define “AI” as lossy storage with random error insertions, it still amounts to unlicensed reproduction.
- mysterydip 2y agoLike saving an image as a JPEG doesn't make it a new work
- mdp2021 2y ago> if we define “AI” as something completely oblivious of the past, it would be a great disservice. > as lossy storage well that would just be a great misunderstanding of what "learning" is.
- Jensson 2y ago> well that would just be a great misunderstanding of what "learning" is. You need to assume a malicious actor here, its trivial to use an AI as lossy storage, if that is legal copyright washing then large corporations will do so at industrial scale.
- mdp2021 2y ago> its trivial to use an You mean, "a Neural Network as function approximator for the reproduction of texts". But in fact, AI cannot be confused with that idea - and be it AI ("system for the replacement of a professional"), or AGI ("system implementing intelligence"), or LLM (which can only be useful as "system with emergent properties from text generation"), "learning" is strongly opposite to "memorizing" (as would be evident in a student - trivial example, one that would memorize a multiplication but be unable to perform it). So, that somebody places a sticker on his apparel to fake a profession for «malicious act[ion]» cannot make us forget the real thing: "learning" is what is sought, and for learning we need the teaching material. ...Which, societally, is rightly decided as free (i.e. stored in libraries).
- pitaj 2y ago> If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation. Yes. > If I can paraphrase it, ditto. Not necessarily. Summarizing, for instance, is typically free use.
- dfawcus 2y agoHow about not simply summarising, but creating a broadly similar novel, with similar characters which undergo broadly similar story arcs? I can see how it could end up as infringement, but also how one could avoid infringement. The issue would seem to be if the original author wishes to sue. As an example, compare Brooks "The Sword of Shannara" with Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings". It is widely accepted that the former is heavily derivative for the latter; in my view essentially being an example of the above broadly similar novel. Yet AFAIK, Tolkein's estate didn't sue Brooks. However if they had, how likely would a victory have been? Now in the case of "Generative LLM", we may have an even closer "derivative work". However the LLM users could well get away with it if they consume a wide enough canon, and the source authors either do not learn of the derivation, or do not have the means to sue.
- blagie 2y agoOne of the key lessons learned in the past half-century is that lawsuits like that are: (a) Often won (b) Pyrrhic victories Right now, it's the policy of Paramount not to sue over very clear violations of Star Trek copyrights (see: Star Trek Continues), Rowling to not do the same for Harry Potter (see: Methods of Rationality), etc. A lawsuit like that results in a modest payout and take-down, together with a loss of brand worth many times that. On the other hand, the derivative works tend to drive brand value, recognition, and sales. That's why many works have clear guidelines supporting and encouraging derivative works, with specific boundaries to make sure they don't undermine those works. I don't know The Sword of Shannara, but each time someone says "inspired by Tolkein" or "building on themes from," Tolkein increases in brand value as a classic and then THE classic. There is a legal line as to where inspiration becomes copying, but if we were to assume, arguendo, that it's clearly over that line, it still probably wouldn't make sense to sue. At best, that would have a chilling impact on more works in the "inspired by" category.
- SilasX 2y ago>Even if we accept the house-of-cards of shaky arguments this essay is built on, even just for the sake of argument, where Open AI breaks my copyright is by having a computer "memorize" my work. That's a form of copy. No, it isn't, unless you're also going to call it copyright infringement when search engines store internal, undistributed copies of websites for purposes of helping answer your search queries. Edit: or, for that matter, accessing a website at all, which creates a copy on your computer.
- toshinoriyagi 2y agoCorrect, the above posted ignored the four prongs of fair use: 1. Is the work more educational or commercial. 2. What is the nature of the underlying work (creative works are more protected). 3. Is the work transformative. 4. What will be the impact on the underlying work's market. Search engines do not make their internal copies available, compete in an entirely different market (that benefits the makers of the underlying works) and are considered quite transformative because they enable discovering vast information on the internet. On the other hand, almost zero LLMs/Text-to-Image generators are educational in nature (certainly none of the ones being sued for copyright infringement). They frequently are trained on highly creative works like art and writing. Some of the work could be transformative, depending on where the learned data manifold the output of your request lies on, but a huge amount is similar to the training data. Lastly, these models have an outsized negative impact on the underlying markets, by being vastly cheaper compared to a human's labor, and for dubious quality at that.
- SilasX 2y agoWhat is that replying to? I was addressing the argument that "well, you stored the work in memory, therefore you infringed copyright". It seems like you agree that that jump doesn't follow, just as I argued?
- toshinoriyagi 2y agoYou are totally correct, I misread your original comment and thought you took the opposite stance.
- mdp2021 2y ago> If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation Of course not: in fact, memorizing has always been a right. (Edit: that would depend on what is meant with "reproduction" though. As written elsewhere, properly done quoting is of course fair use.) > If I can paraphrase it, ditto Even more so: people have lost legal actions because they sued authors of parodies.
- mdp2021 2y agoAfterthought: I realize my reading of the original post should have been more attentive; nonetheless, I would still object that the ideas proposed (e.g. "reproduction" and "paraphrasing") cannot be taken without further specification. The fault is not at that generic level. And the context we should be after should not be this provisional one, of an unfinished technology.
- stuaxo 2y agoExactly- the information wasn't created from whole cloth, but rather by reading (copying inside a computer from disk to ram to gpu) the copyrighted information in the first place.